


Unsatisfying

by RunSquidling



Category: The Breakfast Club (1985)
Genre: Allison in Denial about her sexuality, Allison says lesbian too many times and it's very uncomfortable, F/F, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Neglect, Implied/Referenced Underage Drug Use, Internalized Homophobia, Original Character(s), Pre-Relationship, Self-Denial, Unrequited Crush, but she doesn't quite get that yet, it's part of the internalized homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-17
Updated: 2019-11-17
Packaged: 2021-02-08 04:30:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21470104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RunSquidling/pseuds/RunSquidling
Summary: Allison stops at a coffee shop after running away from home, and has way more feelings than she's ready to deal with about the incredibly obvious lesbians who sit across from her at the community table. Don't they know they're supposed to hide that sort of thing? Don't they know it's not safe?
Relationships: Allison Reynolds/Claire Standish
Comments: 4
Kudos: 24





	Unsatisfying

**Author's Note:**

> Please suspend your disbelief about the Starbucks-style coffee shop setting. I'm not yet thirty and I forgot that this ubiquitous part of my life was not a thing yet in 1985.

“Mocha,” Allison ordered, brusque and sharp and not expecting a counterpoint. The chirpy barista bounced on the balls of her feet and said, “What size?”

Allison did not have an answer for that, so she stood there in glowering silence for a good fifteen seconds, her backpack filled with all her worldly possessions weighing down her shoulder, and then growled, “Small.” 

The barista--a mildly impatient tension in her eyes, though her smile didn’t flag--said, in a strained chirp, “And what’s your name? So I can put it on the cup.”

This was not Allison’s day. She told the barista, who mercifully just wrote it down without peppy comment, and paid. She dropped the seventy-five cents she was given in change into the tip jar, and found herself penniless.

Unless she went home. 

She could go home, technically.

She would probably go home. She’d done this a few times before, packed up and run away, and when she finally went home a few days later, her mother would grumble something about a bid for attention and her father would make her a sandwich without asking what kind she wanted and pat her on the shoulder when he gave it to her, and it would be full of meat and mayonnaise and the one brand of mustard she hated but her father insisted was the best. 

Her home life wasn’t that bad. It was just... unsatisfying. In a way that left her feeling hollow, empty, worthless, and rather like an entire star was exploding inside her and leaving nothing behind. That was the rage.

She hovered by the bar, rocking from her heels to her toes and drawing a great number of stares but no actual interference, until her mocha showed up. She popped the lid off and asked for extra whipped cream, which the glowering barista, her oversized beanie slipping over her eyes, did without really looking. Some whipped cream dripped over the edge of the cup onto Allison’s fingers.

She licked off the excess on the way to the condiments station, and then coated half the whip with chocolate powder, and the other half in cinnamon before finding herself a spot at the community table and sitting with one foot on the chair, knee tucked between her body and the table. She ate the whipped cream with a vengeance before settling in to sip the mocha until it got gritty and disgusting, down at the bottom. 

There was a very confused female robin outside who kept fluffing up her wings and bowing. That was a male display. Nobody was going to notice her without the red breast to go with it.

A good halfway through the mocha, _the interlopers _arrived.

That wasn’t really fair, she supposed, but ordinarily her gloomy aura kept people away from her end of the community table, when she was forced to sit there at all. Unfortunately, she’d chosen a Saturday to run away from home this time, and every inch of every other table was, at this point, full.

“Hi! Do you mind if we sit here?” 

Allison shook her head, even though she did mind, and felt her shoulders crawling up to her ears as the two women sat down across from her, giggling and gossiping and insufferable. They were old, too, with wrinkles beside their eyes. One of them had grey roots under her carroty orange bob, and the other one had a full wolfish head of grey hair, swept into a French braid that dangled down her back.

_That _one was wearing a bomber jacket that looked like it had come straight out of a military overstock store, and her full clip of keys clattered around on her hip like she didn't know how loud they were.

Something about them made Allison feel just... a lot of feelings, just a lot, and she decided that it was anger she was feeling, that they were being so loud and obnoxious and blocking her view of the bird.

She reached into her backpack, shoved her underwear and extra pants out of the way, and dragged her sketchbook and pen out of the bottom. It was a little bent, but she just dragged it over the edge of the table a couple of times, and it was fine. Good enough.

She had a couple of half-finished landscapes she didn’t really need to concentrate on, so she opened up the one she’d done of the forest in the back of her grandparents’ farm and got to work crosshatching between the trees. It was meant to be pretty dark, and she’d only done the outlines when she was there, so there was a lot to work on now.

After a couple of minutes, Allison knew more about their friends Debra and Barbara than she had ever wanted to know about anybody's friends. Apparently they were moving this weekend, and the bomber-jacket-and-keys one was annoyed that they were trying to get her to help them move the piano.

"Just hire piano movers, for god's sake! I know it's expensive but it'll be more expensive to fix the stupid thing when I drop it on one of those spindly legs, or scratch the body or something. I don't mind helping with lifting but a _piano_? Really?"

"I know," the carroty-orange one said sympathetically. "Barbara's been trying to talk her into hiring someone, but you know how Debbie is about money."

Hatching didn't require Allison to actually look at her paper most of the time, so she was glaring through her hair at them when she saw the carroty-orange one's hand reach out to the keys one, and loop their little fingers around each other. The keys one squeezed her finger for a moment, and then they separated, hastily.

See, it was the _furtiveness_ that gave them away, and the strange intimacy of looping fingers instead of hands.

Allison's hand stilled, and she used the shield of her hair to observe them more closely without them noticing. _Lesbians_. She didn't know why, exactly, this particular touch of hands was different from the perfectly ordinary way Claire was always touching _her _friends, but Allison could tell, and it was. Her heart kicked into overdrive and she forced her hand to start moving again.

What did she care if they were lesbians? She had bigger things in her life to worry about than other people's bad choices. She didn't care at all, actually, and returned to her work on the landscape with vigor, her pen blacking out a shadow so thoroughly she very nearly tore through the thick page.

Barbara and Debra were probably lesbians too.

Her pen slowed down as she listened intently to the rest of the conversation.

"You know, _we _could just hire them some piano movers, since you're so worried about it."

"I mean, it's not _that _far, I'm sure Pat and I can manage..."

"Whatever you say. I'm going to go see if we've been forgotten."

The dyed one hopped out of her seat, bells jingling in her ears, and Allison was finally left in the peace and quiet of her own racing heart. She was just so... so angry, because they were so obnoxious. And obvious. How could they be so obvious? How could they just be... _like that_, out in public, in front of everyone? Weren't they scared? Weren't they just so scared, all the time?

"Hey, kid. We got a problem?" the keys one said. Damn. Allison shook her head, her veil of hair falling back into place. She'd gotten complacent. Obvious. She was usually so good at spying on people, but these two had made her so agitated she'd actually turned her head, and gotten noticed.

"That's a full backpack you've got there."

Allison shrugged, moving on to another tree before she tore through the paper here, too. This picture was coming out too dark. She wasn't paying enough attention. If she wasn't careful she'd have to turn it into a night scene.

"You got somewhere safe to stay tonight?"

Allison didn't respond, her heart attempting to beat the land speed record as she wondered if she was being asked to go home with them, if she wanted to see what the inside of a lesbian's house looked like, use a lesbian's shower and towels and guest room toothbrush. The lesbian added, "We can help you find somewhere, if you don't. Pay for a shelter. We know what it's like to not have anywhere to go."

"You're blocking my view of the bird," she managed, sounding grumbly and flat and feeling her shoulders crunch up around her ears as she spoke. "I was watching it."

The lesbian turned to look, and shook her head. "Looks like it's gone."

Allison shrugged. It didn't matter.

The orange one came back, and the keys one accepted her drink, something big and frothy and sweet-smelling. The two of them smiled at each other with charged affection that made Allison incandescently furious.

With a sudden, paralyzing crash, Allison remembered Claire putting her lipstick on with her boobs, and then smearing that same tube on Allison, her fingers firm on Allison's chin to keep her still as she dragged the lipstick that had molded into the shape of her own lips over Allison's. She'd felt the same immense, irrational anger then that she was feeling now, an anger that needed to stay hidden in a different, dangerous way that her run-of-the-mill hair trigger rage didn't.

She closed her sketchpad and shoved it into her backpack. Maybe Bender would let her stay at his house tonight. She felt awful and stupid about that thought, but she didn't have any actual friends, and she couldn’t go home and face her parents right now, but Bender of all people would probably get that. Plus, she'd stolen some benzos from her mom. He'd probably trade her a bit of floor for them.

And maybe Claire would be visiting him.

She didn't quite have that thought, but it was floating under the surface nonetheless.

"You gonna be okay, kid?" said the keys one. The orange one was looking at her curiously, and then understanding clicked as Allison lifted her heavy backpack. She didn't say anything, but Allison knew she was ready to drop everything to help her.

She adjusted the backpack on her shoulders. She didn't like drawing this much attention, and care. It felt weird to have adults notice her existence, notice that she wasn't okay, act like they wanted to help. She wasn't sure if she could trust it. She nodded, hair flopping into her face, but stood there for another second, not sure why she wasn't leaving.

"Go to 5th and Walnut if you change your mind. I'm there Thursday mornings and Friday afternoons," the orange one said. "Even if you don't need help. It's a nice place to be away from home for a bit."

Stiffly, Allison nodded, then tucked her thumbs under her backpack straps and trudged out of the shop. She didn't need help, especially from a couple of lesbians who were just _lesbianing _out in the open, where it wasn't safe, where anyone could see them and anything could happen, but she wouldn't mind being away from home for a while.

Maybe it would be safe, there. Maybe these two were so dumb because they came from somewhere where it was safe, and they'd forgotten that the real world wasn't.

She wasn't a lesbian, of course, but she wouldn't mind trying their safe place out. Just for a little bit.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos so much appreciated! I am I shy bean so I don't generally respond, but I can guarantee I read them all. Come see me [on tumblr if you want](https://runsquidling.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
